Sperm: The Final Frontier

At Northwestern, his fellow undergrads were giving him an education in 1960s politics. It was two years after the Summer of Love in San Francisco. More than 33,500 U.S. troops had been killed in Vietnam. Project Apollo's Eagle had landed on the moon. A decade after the female birth-control pill hit the market, millions of American women were taking it, but plenty of others, including Pope Paul VI, were opposing it.

"I just felt that I could do something beyond just voicing an opinion," Tash says. "Since I had an interest in science and saw possibilities, it opened my eyes in that area."

Tash gravitated toward a professor named Larry Gilbert, who was studying insect hormones. It was Tash's first chance to do real research.

The science of birth control at the time was all about hormones — the female pill uses hormones to prevent a woman from producing an egg. But in men, blocking the hormones that produce sperm has too many unhappy side effects — mainly, decreased testosterone. No man wants less testosterone. Having less testosterone kills the sex drive and shrivels muscles, among other disturbing consequences.

His junior year, in 1971, Tash got another life-changing summer internship. This one was at the University of Cambridge in England. He studied with Michael Berridge, a pioneer in discovering the ways that cells communicate with one another.

Berridge's title is now "professor sir" because he was knighted in 1997 for his contributions to science. In an e-mail to the Pitch, Berridge writes of the young Tash, "He stood head and shoulders above the other students at Cambridge both for his intelligence and for his grasp of the literature." Also, "He had that special quality, which is so lacking in most scientists, of knowing exactly what he wanted to do. He had the maturity to identify an outstanding problem and was able to formulate how he was going to tackle it."

In the afternoons at Cambridge that summer, Tash would join his colleagues at the Eagle Pub. The tavern was a famous hangout of James Watson and Francis Crick, who had won a Nobel Prize in 1962 for discovering the structure of DNA. Tash grew fond of the bar's thin-shaved corned-beef sandwiches, Greene King ale and 25-pence slot machines.

"A lot of Cambridge profs would go down late in the afternoon for drinks," Tash says. "They'd talk about science and everything else."

It was a thrilling summer for a Yankee undergrad, and Tash fell in love with the place. After his senior year at Northwestern, he went back to Cambridge in 1972 for a doctorate in reproductive biology.

Just outside Cambridge was the Animal Research Station. The sprawling farm had been set up by the British government specifically for Thaddeus Mann, a world-renowned expert in the physiology of sperm and semen. Scientists came from all over the world to study the reproductive systems of sheep, pigs, cattle, horses, rabbits and rodents.

He had gone there to be mentored by Mann but ended up surrounded by experts. "I never knew there could be so many people working on male reproduction," Tash says.

He began to focus on the questions that he would spend a career answering: "How does sperm function? What makes it move? How does it find, penetrate and survive the journey through the female reproductive system for several days? What is it about sperm and all of its components that allows it to do its little job?"

When he wasn't in the lab, Tash rode horses, including the queen's mare, which had been sent to Mann with reproductive problems. And he competed with the University of Cambridge equestrian team in a pastoral sport that afforded him fresh air and relief from the rigors of research.

Tash wore his hair long and spent late nights working as a roadie for a band called Public Foot the Roman. On its only album, recorded in 1973, the band sounds like a blend of Yes, the Who and the Allman Brothers.

"When You Lay It Down" by Public Foot the Roman:

A Cambridge local named Lorraine Stutzman caught his attention. They were married in 1977.

Just before Tash accepted a postdoctoral position at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, he cut his long hair. These days, Tash wears the stylish buzz for men who don't have so much hair anymore. His drinking establishment is the LattéLand on the Plaza, the one with the Ben Franklin statue out front. He's such a regular that when some of the coffee shop's employees organized a trip to rebuild houses in New Orleans, he went along. He gets a lot of good writing done at LattéLand.

It took him awhile to get to Kansas City, though.

Tash arrived at Baylor just after marrying Lorraine. In Texas, he began studying sperm in a new way. This line of research would lead him closer to the male pill.